He put on the cups, and the old tailor, Kiryak, and the little girls stood round and looked on, and it seemed to them that they saw the disease being drawn out of Nikolay; and Nikolay, too, watched how the cups suckling at his breast gradually filled with dark blood, and felt as though there really were something coming out of him, and smiled with pleasure.

“It’s a good thing,” said the tailor.  “Please God, it will do you good.”

The Jew put on twelve cups and then another twelve, drank some tea, and went away.  Nikolay began shivering; his face looked drawn, and, as the women expressed it, shrank up like a fist; his fingers turned blue.  He wrapped himself up in a quilt and in a sheepskin, but got colder and colder.  Towards the evening he began to be in great distress; asked to be laid on the ground, asked the tailor not to smoke; then he subsided under the sheepskin and towards morning he died.

IX

Oh, what a grim, what a long winter!

Their own grain did not last beyond Christmas, and they had to buy flour.  Kiryak, who lived at home now, was noisy in the evenings, inspiring terror in everyone, and in the mornings he suffered from headache and was ashamed; and he was a pitiful sight.  In the stall the starved cows bellowed day and night—­a heart-rending sound to Granny and Marya.  And as ill-luck would have it, there was a sharp frost all the winter, the snow drifted in high heaps, and the winter dragged on.  At Annunciation there was a regular blizzard, and there was a fall of snow at Easter.

But in spite of it all the winter did end.  At the beginning of April there came warm days and frosty nights.  Winter would not give way, but one warm day overpowered it at last, and the streams began to flow and the birds began to sing.  The whole meadow and the bushes near the river were drowned in the spring floods, and all the space between Zhukovo and the further side was filled up with a vast sheet of water, from which wild ducks rose up in flocks here and there.  The spring sunset, flaming among gorgeous clouds, gave every evening something new, extraordinary, incredible—­just what one does not believe in afterwards, when one sees those very colours and those very clouds in a picture.

The cranes flew swiftly, swiftly, with mournful cries, as though they were calling themselves.  Standing on the edge of the ravine, Olga looked a long time at the flooded meadow, at the sunshine, at the bright church, that looked as though it had grown younger; and her tears flowed and her breath came in gasps from her passionate longing to go away, to go far away to the end of the world.  It was already settled that she should go back to Moscow to be a servant, and that Kiryak should set off with her to get a job as a porter or something.  Oh, to get away quickly!